YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Walker

lines on the record: 148
first: 2023-02-08
most recent: 2023-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Out of time, thank you for the privilege of being a repeat offender, a second repeat offender on the podcast for all of the sins that I've offered in terms of sleep advice. So thank you for having me.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, people can find me. I'm on Twitter at Sleep Diplomat. I'm on Instagram at Dr. Matt Walker. That's D-R-M-A-T-W-A-L-K-E-R. And I also have a podcast, if you're not sick and tired of my voice, and it's creatively called The Matt Walker podcast, which can be found on all platforms. And that's probably about it.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're stopping yourself from doing what you normally like to do, but you still get half of the fluid intake. Other than that, it's very challenging.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The late afternoon in the early evening? And is it worth it to me to get that continuity of sleep? Is it that I don't stop drinking the number of drinks that I have, but starting at 5 p.m. or 4 p.m., I actually will just have half the size of the drink that I normally would. So I don't fool my brain into thinking you are in a famine of fluid. I still have the same number of drinks. So my habit is still satisfied with having three or four whatever drinks I'm having. But the volume is halved and therefore the psychology is still easier to adopt. But the impact is reduced by 50%. That's one of the ways that you could try to, or at least I've tried to get around the effect. And when people speak to me, I advise them that that's one method that you can try to fool your brain. Don't feel as though you...”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've definitely experienced this as I'm getting older. I used to sleep throughout the night. Now I probably get up, you know, on average at least once every second night to go to the restroom. We don't have a particularly good approach to this in terms of medications. There's nothing that there are a few medications out there to try to decrease the likelihood and the frequency of those. And I think those medications are more about trying to increase the expulsion of urine such that before bed, you expel more of that fluid and so less is left as you are casting off into sleep to trigger the awakening. But there's nothing that I know that helps suppress that reflex and that desire during sleep. And it's really then at that point, unfortunately, down to how do I taper off my fluid intake throughout.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are the nuanced neurobiological and biophysical changes within the body and the brain? Regarding sleep, we've got no idea. There are studies that have done these different flavors, but they've never done a randomized control trial where you assign people to each one of these two in the same protocol and then ask, you know, basically Coke Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, whatever you want to line up challenge and put them all head-to-head to see which one wins out. We don't know right now.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interval training, and they've also looked at steady state cardio. Right now, I don't think we have enough data to separate between those two. Simply that both of those will provide a nice sleep benefit and a boost both in the, it's not just that it boosts the amount of deep sleep. It also boosts the continuity of your sleep, meaning that you're going to wake up fewer times throughout the night and you'll have a nice longer consolidated bout of total sleep as a consequence. That's one of the other benefits of exercise on sleep. But again, resistance training also provides those benefits too. They're just not quite as voluminous. But to your question, no one has done the systematic study where you try to, I mean, it's only now being worked out in the field of exercise itself, which is really understanding when you put all of these different flavors of hit versus zone two exactly.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so aerobic seems to potentially outdo, if you put them head to head in a sort of Coke Pepsi challenge, basically doing cardio seems to produce a greater benefit relative to resistance training. In other words, lifting weights. But lifting weights is still better than doing nothing at all. So don't feel worried about the fact that, oh my goodness, I'm principally someone who just goes into the gym and lifts weights. I'm not going to get to sleep benefit you will relative to being sedentary. That's definitely the worst situation. But aerobic seems to, and we call it aerobic exercise, but most of the time it's anaerobic. It's where you go without oxygen. And that's where all of the good stuff can happen too. Although I'm a big fan of zone 2 as well, Peter Letia, thank you.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“shoot, shifting from the fight or flight down to the parasympathetic in part is one of the reasons why you get better sleep by way of exercise. It benefits across all ages, by the way. It's not just that young people benefit from exercise, old people do as well. You can look at different forms of exercise. And right now, I don't think there's enough data. There's some data that, you know, aerobic versus resistance training may lead to somewhat greater benefits on sleep, at least on non-REM sleep and the consistency of your sleep.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should be and prescribes the right one for whatever conditions you've been doing that day, whether it's physical exercise, whether it's learning intensively material, that is figured out for you. But you're absolutely right. Exercise will induce that. Part of that is because of the low grade inflammation that it's a pro-inflammatory state by way of exercise. I think there are other factors too that probably help with that. Some of them may be related to temperature. Some of them may be related to the degree of parasympathetic downshoot that you get after exercise. So you get very sympathetic and stressed in terms of the nervous system. Of course, but then you typically have this drop that comes down and you dip below your typical level. That's what you see in heart rate, you see it in blood pressure. That's one of the benefits of exercise. So I think this nice downshift.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there is, and it's funny you should mention that literally this week on my podcast I released the first of a three part series all about sleep and exercise and it's exactly what you predict that exercise hugely beneficial for sleep the principal stage of sleep that it seems to induce is an increase in the amount of deep non-rem sleep and particularly the power of those powerful big slow brain waves One of the interesting things is though that there is no free lunch that you when you exercise intensively if you look across the studies yes you increase the amount of deep sleep but it does seem to come at the cost of REM sleep that you will have a reliable and statistical drop in the amount of REM sleep now I don't think that's anything to be concerned about if you're exercising I think it's simply that once again Mother Nature knows what the menu of sleep stage options”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's write the screenplay. I'm represented by WME. I don't know if you're with the same agency, but we should definitely do the joint screenplay and let's sell it for probably about $20.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Used to do some like, you know, fairly hard nosed good neuroscience data, and then towards the end of his career, he kind of lost it. He was going on podcasts and he started dreaming up of all these crazy theories. And that was the end of him. Next we know he's selling books door to door in some odd... To me, that could be a wild and plausible currently charlatan nonsensical idea. But if we can prove it, and I think it's a testable hypothesis, that's why I entertain it, because I'm a scientist and it has to be a testable hypothesis, what does that mean for us as a species in terms of what dreams do and influence to us as a species and as a society?”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now if that is true, and if I can prove that, and I've got some ideas, I mean, I've always got way too many experiments than I can do, but if I can prove that that's true, what that could unleash is the maybe scary fact that most of our dreams, firstly, are residing within us. And vast amounts of our dreaming life are non-consciously implicitly unaware to us, influencing our everyday choices and our behaviors. That right now sounds a lot like Charlotte and science. That sounds like hooey to me. That sounds like total BS.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Accessible. And the evidence I have for this, and it's happened, you know, to me multiple times, I'll wake up in the morning and I know for a fact I was dreaming. And the harder I try, I just can't remember it. And it just seems to evaporate as if the memory is gone. And the availability of the memory, its presence in my brain, we all assume in science is no longer there. That memory has evaporated. But then two or three days later, I could be in the shower and washing my hair and I look at the shampoo bottle and there's something about the label that triggers the instant recollection of that dream from three days ago. And it all comes flooding back. In other words, it wasn't a problem of availability of the dream. It was a problem of accessibility of the dream memory. The memory is there. It's just that I don't have conscious access to it.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know that there is such a thing as non-conscious memory or implicit memory. And I think people have conflated an issue with memory that is about accessibility versus availability. And what I mean by that is you can learn some information and it can be available. It can be there in your brain. That memory is present. But for whatever reason lose the IP address to the memory so it is not accessible. And right now we have conflated accessibility of dreams with availability of dreams such that we say well you can't remember most of your dreams so we assume that that memory is not available, that that memory is not present in your brain. I don't believe that's true. I think that memory could be present available, but it's simply not.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, and this is probably just because we've been talking about dreaming for so long, I do have a theory of dreaming that is currently not very well supported. Most science right now suggests, just as I did when it comes to dreaming, that we are amnesic, that we forget most, if not all of our dreaming life, that it's just not imprinted into our brains. I think that there could be a day and a time in the future where we realize we have been desperately wrong about this and that our dreaming lives are influencing our waking lives in a far more powerful way than we ever thought, I was going to say dreamed, than we ever thought possible. And here's the reason.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An accurate statement in the sense that the insular cortex does do that mapping of time, but it does seem to do it all of the time and some of it probably non-consciously, but they have done studies where, let's say, that you ask people to say count time, count two minutes of time. And they'll just sit there and they'll just try and sense time, quantify time. the accuracy from one individual to the next in terms of mapping that subjective sense of two minutes is predicted by the insular activity itself the greater the insular activity the greater your precision of mapped timing so it really does seem to be one of the seats of mapped time”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think what's happening is that the insular cortex has some interesting changes. We see it changing in its activity during dream sleep. My prediction is that if I start to map your perception of time in dream sleep, I think it's going to be predicted by changes in activity within this part of the brain called the insular cortex, which is constantly mapping the affective visceral state of your experience consciously. So I've got a neural theory, it's hand waving, but...”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time just slowed down. The emotion was so intense that all of a sudden it was like, you know, when you see on a video camera, you go from a standard frame rate and all of a sudden, and you can now do it on your iPhone, you can slow it down and you can get really high resolution, slow temples, slow motion activity. It was like that because the insular cortex was starting to map with much higher frame rates. And therefore time slowed down. I realized I was going to be hit and I realized I'm clipped into my pedals on the bike. I'm going to clip out because I don't want to go under the car where my bike is going. I'd much prefer to go over the car onto the windscreen and off. So I remember that happened obviously within milliseconds, but I remember clipping out, thinking all of this within time.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through and a car came out of a junction, and I could just see it, and it hit me and I went through the windscreen of the car and came out. And that moment of time, which was obviously pretty traumatic, kind of pretty emotional event where you”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's fascinating too, and I have a right now, I do have a neural hypothesis for this, and there's a part of the brain called the insular cortex that sort of is in the left and the right side, but it's very deep inside. And it serves many different functions. But one of its functions is the mapping of your bodily state of your emotions and the updating it from one moment to the next to the next. So the insular cortex is consistently mapping the physiological state of your body from one moment to the next to the next. The reason I bring that up is because the physiological emotional state of your body contributes to time. How does it do that? I think you and I and everyone listening has also had that experience where they said, I just had this emotional experience and all of a sudden time slowed down. I remember when I was an avid cyclist and I've been knocked off my bike a few times and I remember one time I was going”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five minutes in the waking world is now 50 minutes at the first level of the dream and you go down a next level and now five minutes is now five hours and then the next level it's five years and the next level it's 50 years and you're constantly doing this sort of time dilation as it were it comes up with some fascinating ideas but science just getting to that position now where we can understand time during sleep because it is strange it's a very strange thing time with sleep”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it's a different dream. And then the alarm goes off again, and it's been five minutes in the waking world, but you personally, you think that wasn't five minutes. I felt like I was dreaming for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, as if time is different in the dream escape. And what I've described this as is time dilation, that it's during dream sleep that we almost stretch time out. What would be the neurobiological basis of that? Well, I think it could be some of this rat work that suggests that perhaps during dream sleep, the brain slows down the recapitulation of time. And you can have all sorts of fun with this idea. Christopher Nolan was wise enough to consult some researchers and come up with this idea in inception way, we'd have different dream levels where in the first level.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The time perception is interesting. When you and I, let's say we gone a long whole flight and you're lucky enough to actually fall asleep on the flight and it's dark on the flight. When you wake up, what is one of the first things that you do? One of the first things that you do is you check your watch, you check your phone because you're trying to look to the time. Because when you sleep, you lose all conscious perception of time. You've got no idea. And that's the reason that you check how long have I been asleep. Why don't you know? I don't know because I don't track time when I'm sleeping. However, when you dream something different happens, maybe you've had this experience I certainly have and many people have. Your alarm goes off and you have a snooze button and the snooze button is for five minutes. So the alarm wakes you up and you hit the snooze button and you were dreaming and you go back to sleep and you go back to dreaming. Maybe it's the same.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think this has relationships to the component of time and our time perception, which is totally freaky, by the way. Time and I kind of have written about this and have a few theories and we're really interested about how to do this. By the way, I haven't forgotten about your question as to what is Charleston science and I will come back to that because I've vaguely still holding on to my memory despite being in the foothills of middle age.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I know. You can almost see visions of the atomic bomb. By the way, I would say that it's a bit extreme, Matthew, but what happens during REM sleep is really quite different. It's during deep non-rem sleep that those memories are replayed, as I said, about 10 times faster. But when you go into dream sleep, and this is work done by Matt Wilson, not me, Matt Wilson, at MIT, he found that the rat brain does replay memories during REM sleep, but it doesn't replay them faster and it doesn't even replay them at waking speed. It replays them at about zero point five times the speed. So it's like listening to this podcast and all of a sudden you hit that sort of button that says no go slow and everyone sort of slows down.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The cheap version of that that I'm going to study organic chemistry and I'm going to blaze up some green tea incense, which I personally really like. And then before I go to bed at night, am I going to put back on the green tea incense and start trying to stuff that back at my nose and either improve my memory or burn my house down and be a scientist no more and char grill the rest of my body because it's a desperate fire safety hazard and you'd never want to do it. But this is the idea that there's something that was starting to understand about the sleeping brain that not just is understanding, but it gives us the ability to take control. And at that point, That becomes kind of scary because should we be taking control of a process that maybe is not really Our purview to be in control of”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dishes of memory, I get to choose. I can say, no, no, no, I don't want that information. I want this particular information tonight. And I'm going to develop this auditory playlist. And so the question then becomes, can you start using that method?”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is another house that's the match. And then there is one tea kettle, and then there is one fire. But they did this on the computer, and each time they were learning this sort of associative spatial layout of information, when they would turn over the tea kettle, they would hear a tea kettle sound. And when they turn over the fire engine, they would hear a fire engine sound. So once again, they were bonding a sound, a congruent semantic sound with that particular information visually. And then they let them sleep. And as they went into deep non-rem sleep, they would replay those sounds at what we call a sub awakening threshold where it was loud enough to get into the brain. But yeah, critical for people. Yeah, please, please, please, don't do that. And what they were able to do is essentially an even more selective process of cherry-picking. So now, whatever I want to serve up to the menu of this thing called sleep at night in terms of the difference.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then, what they would do is they would let those individuals fall asleep. And during deep non-rem sleep, when we believe the memories are being replayed, they started to re-perfuse that rose odor up their nose. And as a consequence, the next day, there was about a 40 to 50% improvement in their memory because they had brute forced the reactivation of the memory. It's almost as though they decided to take that memory and give it VIP access to the memory replay during non-rem sleep and you start to cherry pick information and then Ken Poller and others, they started to look at this and they did it even more cleverly. I think the way the game over here in America is actually called memory where it's a set of cards all out on a table and each card has its own per so you turn one card over into a house and you turn another card over and somewhere in the rest of the deck.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of that, then it probably restarted back with some French scientists in the early 2000s and then there was a big paper in Nature by a German group. And they tried to hijack this system of memory replay. And it was brilliant. It was so clever. And now Ken Parlor at Northwestern has been doing some of these studies. Here's what they did. They had people learn information, but they associated that information with somatosensory stimuli and what I mean by that is you're learning a list of words and then during that list of words I'm infusing a rose perfume up your nose with a mask. And what you're doing, the brain is bonding the scent, the odor of the rose with the learned information. So now you've got a bonded memory with the odor.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Running around the maze. He was listening to the brain imprinting these memories. The brilliant part of his study was that he didn't stop recording when the session ended. He kept recording from that memory center as those rats went into sleep and went into deep non-rep. And when they went into deep non-rem sleep, he kept listening. And when you eavesdrop on the sleeping brain, not only was the memory replayed, but it wasn't replayed at waking speed. It was replayed almost ten times faster. So instead what he was hearing, instead of it, he was hearing as if these rats were just replaying the memory at high frequency speed, as if they're etching the memory into the glass surface of the brain and scoring the memory trace even more powerfully. So we know that memory replay is a critical component.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so the other aspect of memory that you could optimize, and people have been doing this, and I don't think it's mainstream yet comes back to the second mechanism of why sleep is good for memory. It's not just about shifting memories from short-term to long-term. It's about memory replay. The story emerged back in the 1990s when a scientist called Bruce McNorton at the University of Arizona, he was measuring the memory cell activity in rats as they were running around a maze. And he was trying to learn how the hippocampus codes a maze and basically how it builds a memory circuit of the maze. And he was recording individual cells in the hippocampus. And he wasn't doing this, but you can just think of this as each cell has a tone to it. And as the rat would run around the maze, what he would hear is the signature of learning that would sound a little bit like as the rat was.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, you know, and what are we trying to do? And we've always got to think about free lunches. And if you ever get one. So I would say that that's probably one of the areas I would also say that the sleeping brain often takes care of itself. What we've learned is that when you have people do intensive learning sessions and you measure their sleep that following night relative to when they've not been doing intensive learning sessions, lo and behold, the brain after the intensive learning session artificially for that night, it's not artificially adaptively for that night increases the amount of spindles that it gets. So your brain actually knows what it needs and it self-medicates with greater numbers of spindles. So we may almost not need to worry about that. It's wild, isn't it? When we sort of made that discovery.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Skill learning was also dependent on lighter stages of non-REM sleep, but once again on sleep spindles. And a recent group, this wasn't us, although we're doing these studies too, they applied stimulation at the sleep spindle frequency range and they were able to improve aspects of motor skill learning as well, which is kind of wild when you think about airline pilots, musicians, and professional athletes. Can you actually adopt and learn some of these new skills and then supercharge them overnight with electrical brain stimulation? Is that going to be in 10 years' time a banned electroceutical rather than a banned pharmaceutical in sports?”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And you sort of want those to sort of just go just in this lovely rhythmic sink. We've been developing some brain simulation technology to see if we can do this. We can certainly boost your deep sleep brainwaves with brain stimulation. We can also improve your sleep spindles. And here what we're doing is we're applying electricity through the brain where you don't feel it. It's so small it's a small voltage, but we can stimulate at a slow frequency brainwave and we can act like a choir to that flagging lead vocalist and boost those slow waves. But we can also stimulate at the frequency of the sleep spindles, which is a much faster frequency somewhere between 12 to 15 hertz, 12 to 15 cycles per second. And we can also induce those sleep spindles. By the way, motor learning is another good example. We did some studies, gosh, 10 years ago now at least, where we found that motor.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in terms of the sleep spindles, and I wouldn't probably just focus on the sleep spindles, I would focus on the combination of deep slow brainwaves and sleep spindles, yeah, the synchronization of this. What we call is phase amplitude coupling is the technical term, which is the phase of the wave and the coupling of that peak of that.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Returns at this point. But then if I close the book and I start trying to learn French, I actually think my learning capacity is renewed and refreshed. And so I think there is something about the context of the information that the familiarity versus the novelty can also reinstantiate your learning ability. Does that make some sense?”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is that your ability to focus and attend and have a spotlight of attentional focus, you need attention to imprint information, at least consciously. There is non-conscious learning too, but when you are constantly time on task, that spotlight of attention starts to fade and your ability to focus on what you should learn decreases and therefore what you learn decreases. It's not really related to the fact that your memory fatiguing itself, but I think there's evidence for that too. One of the things that I've always been fascinated by, and I want to do the study, but it's one of those bucket list studies, I don't think it's quite as simple as that. I at least have found in my own personal experience and heard from others that I could be learning information about organic chemistry for an hour and I just know that I'm just starting to fade. My learning is just getting miserable. It's just diminished.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does mesh very well, which is that you're getting the primacy in the recency. So it's like this bananas, this bow-shaped where the information in the middle of the list, you don't remember very well, but the stuff at the front and the back end of it, you do remember well. Well, if you do only one learning session, you only get two stanchions. Either end of the bridge of primacy and recency. But if you split it up into six chunks, then you're getting six hits of primacy and recency, which gives you a great benefit. That's one of them. The other we think actually relates to attention.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great if you chunk it up into different sort of segments, your learning is much better. You still spend the same two hours of learning, but if you spread it across four hours than two hours straight, much better. But sleep is a part of that. So that's the first of the two mechanisms.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it's very good at running around during the day and grabbing individual files from different locations, but it has a limited storage capacity. But then at night you shift those memories from that short-term reservoir of the hippocampus to the hard drive, the cortex, which gives you two benefits. The first is that that which you learned before sleep is now shifted over and protected and safe in the new location. But the second benefit is that because you've cleared out the USB stick of the hippocampus, when you wake up, you've got a refreshed learning ability. And so you can start acquiring new files all over again. It's a symbiotic relationship that we've discovered. And I think that's one of the explanations for why you were able to just rip through the material, do it in a short burst. By the way, we know that that's optimal for learning. It's called MAST versus spaced practice. If you try to learn in one long bout, not”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've published some work where as long as you get this perfect timing between a slow wave and then a sleep spindle, it's almost like making sure that the drummer is directly on the beat in this rhythmic sort of capacity. So you have a slow wave and then you have a sleep spindle riding on top of it, this electrical burst of activity. The slow waves, they go up and down maybe once or twice a second. The sleep spindles. They burst at about 14 or 15 times per second, 14 or 15 hertz. And it's the timing, the combined quality of these two deep sleep brainwaves that will shift memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoir, the hippocampus, to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain and protecting them, and that long-term storage site is the cortex that sits on top of your brain. I mean, I don't want to do computer brain analogies, but I suppose the idea would be your hippocampus is a little bit like a USB stick.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know why there are a number of immune factors inflammatory factors that call up to play this thing called deep sleep. Those immune factors are things like cytokines, and they are very sleep inducing. That's why you typically want to curl up and get into bed. That's why you typically sleep more when you are sick. Because the human organism understands that the very best health insurance policy that it has, the very best Swiss army knife of health, is this tool called sleep. And it brings all of the armament of sleep to the core. So part of the reason you were sleeping so much is because you were undergoing the infection. You had a supercharged amount of deep sleep, it turns out. What happens the first mechanism of deep sleep? And it's not just the sleep spindles and it's not just the big, powerful slow waves of deep non-rem sleep. It's the combination of those two that we've discovered.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do and I think it comes back to the neural mechanisms of memory consolidation. So there are at least two different mechanisms, non-mutually exclusive, that promote the cementing of that new information, but also the freeing up of your short-term memory capacity. And what we've discovered, we and others have done this work, the first method is a file transfer mechanism that when you go into deep non-rem sleep, which by the way is dialed up by way of infection, when you get sick, you have an increase in sleep drive, particularly for deep non-rem sleep.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That has never been understood in the entirety of human civilization. And I cannot tell you how much of a thrill and a privilege that is. And so is science-hearted? It's brutally hard. But just that alone, the hedonic rush that you get from de novo knowledge. Gosh, it's never left me, and I don't think it ever will.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is so, but it's so rewarding though. At the moment when we analyze the data and I'm sitting there with the student or I'm analyzing data and we finally run the statistics, at that moment in time, if I'm lucky, I know something.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I would say that the study is partly flawed in terms of its selection bias because ahead of time we tell them in the consent form, look, you could be in a group that is going to be sleep deprived or a group that is going to have your sleep sort of well rested and full. And so would you like to continue? So in some ways, they know that they're rolling the dice. They could or could not be sleep deprived. And so you could argue there's still a selection bias in that regard, but it's not the, we don't do selection assignment. We do random assignment.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two groups now was magnified almost tenfold. In other words, the people who had been sleep deprived the first night, yes, they could still test to a degree, they were worse, but they still got some degree of the answers right. But the amount of catastrophic forgetting that happened across those following four weeks, relative to the group that imprinted those memories and saved them the first night, was far less, there was a lot less forgetting in the group that had. And I put this in context simply because I don't want to simply educate human minds, which is what I do as a job, only for you to test well the next day, but then two years later, you've got none of that information in your brain. What's the point of higher education then? It should be long term. And so it's a very insightful suggestion that you make. And we tried to test it. I should publish some of that data.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT